Business Technology Trends You Must Watch

Through work and research, there have been some technology trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years.

1. Distributing co-creation

The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Today, in the high-technology, consumer product, and automotive sectors, among others, companies routinely involve customers, suppliers, small specialist businesses, and independent contractors in the creation of new products. Outsiders offer insights that help shape product development, but companies typically control the innovation process. Technology trends now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders–co-creation–in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks.

2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also co-create with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers. But the differences between the ways companies co-create with partners, on the one hand, and with customers, on the other, are so marked that the consumer technology trends side is really a separate trend. These differences include the nature and range of the interactions, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them.

3. Tapping into a world of talent

As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence. Much as technology trends permit them to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks.

4. Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities of technology trends. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration–tacit interactions.